1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the interactive storage, retrieval, and communication of information, and more specifically to a design that unifies these activities using a controlled vocabulary and employes enhanced operator interfaces.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years the availability and use of information has been found to be critically important to industry, business, and other areas that are information intensive. With the advent of automated data processing equipment various forms of information storage and retrieval devices have been developed.
The scope of these devices is shown in FIG. 1 and the use of four planes in the figure is a graphical device to help illustrate differences among four groups of devices and to help relate these four groups to the disclosed invention. The diagonal thread through the four planes is used to suggest how the disclosed invention unifies these planes into a single device.
The top plane 2 is a group of devices that aid in the communication of information via telecommunications. Prior to the advent of desktop computers, electronic mail employed central computers and connections to computer terminals to send and receive information. More recently there have been a variety of configurations some which use central computers as store and forward devices and some where electronic mail and other transmissions occur from desktop to desktop. Curiously, some of the better devices to aid in the receipt and transmission of desktop information among standalone personal computers have come from shareware sources such as ProComm and QModem. Another development in recent years has been the Local Area Network (LAN) which has served to provide a coherent telecommunication channel among a group of personal computers, work stations, or the like. A common mode of operation for electronic mail is to move messages based on the identities of sending and receiving individuals much like the postal system. Another mode has been the electronic bulletin board where messages are posted under topics on a central computer. Still another form has taken the form of computer teleconferencing where the concept of the bulletin board is extended using topic structure and other enhancements.
The second plane in FIG. 1 depicts a group of devices that store text (and text related) information for retrieval and/or printing. Text database management systems have been developed for large mainframe computers such as the Dialog System by Lockheed (currently Knight Ridder) to personal computer based systems such as CITATION and Xyindex. These systems often operate with large inverted indexes of search words, often supplemented by controlled vocabularies sometimes called descriptors and in the case of the Library of Medicine, called MESH headings. Word processors have evolved substantially beyond the typewriter to permit not only ease in text entry and editing but also the facilities to do desktop publishing where text and graphics are easily combined in camera ready output. Most recently, a form of text information organizing devices have been called Personal Information Managers (PIM) and these devices perform a variety of functions including accessing disparate text information on a personal computer and providing ways of organizing information by attaching keywords to blocks of text. Examples of these include products called IZE, GRANDVIEW, and AGENDA.
The third plane depicts a group of devices called outliners or thought tools. These devices are for the most part computer-based outline facilities and gain their popularity by being able to turn on and turn off parts of the outline. A shareware product called PC Outline (PCO) has gained large usage on the IBM class of machines and ThinkTank has gained popularity on the Apple Macintosh class of machines. The main characteristic of these devices is the use of categories as an organizing approach to text and thinking.
The fourth plane depicts a group of devices called decision support tools or systems (DSS). There are a wide variety of approaches to providing decision support and brief summary is difficult. A common approach, however, is to take a problem requiring choices to be made and decompose the problem into a set of factors or components. This multi-factoral approach to decision making is derived from management and marketing science. Personal computer based products of this style include DecisionMap, Lightyear, and Expert Choice.
The use of hierarchical structures to organize information has a long history. Taxonomies for library use have developed categories and subcategories for information and the filing of books. The use of graphical displays of such hierarchical structures for information retrieval includes products such as TOPIC (formerly RUBRIC). The use of graphical displays of hierarchical structures for depicting organizational structures include an early public domain product called ORGZ and a commercial product called ORG. The use of graphical displays of hierarchical structures for project management includes the Harvard Project Manager (now Software Publishing Corp.) and the use of such displays for decision trees has a long history with Texas Instruments (at Austin, Tex). The use of graphical displays of hierarchial structures for decision support (of the multi-factoral variety) include an early commercial product called DecisionMap and another product called Expert Choice. Further, the use of hierarchical structures and graphical display have a long history with disk based operating systems both on the Apple Macintosh and the IBM PC where these structures can be visually displayed and edited. Products include the Apple Finder, Norton's Utilities, and VTREE. The Apple Finder can be traced back to work done in graphical displays at the Xerox Research Facilities at Pato Alto in the mid 1970's.
While each of these devices and products have particular stengths and capabilities, none of them were designed as a unified, seamless system to store, retrieve, and communicate information in relation to task work. Thus while pieces of the disclosed invention can be found scattered among the related art, there is no system in its entireity like the disclosed invention.